IBM Expands Hybrid Cloud Service Targeting Banks and Healthcare

The extended offering, called IBM Cloud Satellite, allows customers to control how they store their information, some of which is kept internally in what is known as the private cloud, and other data is stored in public clouds such as Amazon.com Inc’s AWS or Microsoft Corp’s Azure Blue.

Lagging behind cloud services, IBM is targeting highly regulated industries such as banking and healthcare, which have been slow to adopt internet storage solutions due to security and scale concerns.

For these industries, integrating public and private clouds has proven to be “too complex, too expensive and very risky,” said Howard Boville, hybrid cloud manager at IBM. To accommodate these customers, Cloud Satellite is designed to streamline cybersecurity and make regulatory compliance invisible, Boville said.

IBM sees this development as a crucial step in CEO Arvind Krishna’s vision to transform the century-old company into a modern enterprise focused on hybrid cloud and artificial intelligence. IBM has worked with 65 companies including Dell, Intel Corp. and Cisco Systems Inc., to help customers run workloads and provide information on the development of Cloud Satellite.

Lumen Technologies, formerly known as CenturyLink, will be a Cloud Satellite partner and deploy the service to 180,000 corporate sites. The possibility of offering the Cloud Satellite service to companies where the data now resides will help reassure companies whose data is very sensitive and who have been reluctant to move it to a public storage site, according to IBM.

Only 20% of business data is in the cloud today, we have the opportunity to help move 80% of critical workloads to the cloud, IBM said in a statement Monday.

Since taking over as CEO last spring, Krishna has quickly implemented IBM’s transformation plan. Speaking to investors in January, Krishna said he was confident that the company’s focus on these areas could help it achieve revenue growth in 2021, reversing a ten-quarter trend of absence. growth or decline in sales.

Krishna, who previously headed IBM’s cloud division, was the driving force behind the $34 billion purchase of open source software provider Red Hat in 2018, the first step in IBM’s transition to what it is. considers a $1 trillion hybrid cloud market. The company is also expected to complete the split this year from its managed infrastructure services unit into a separate, publicly traded company.

By Brody Ford